Five Questions: Dr. Nancy Pineda-Madrid

Editor’s Note: Dr. Nancy Pineda-Madrid was in the Diocese of Amarillo Dec. 2-4 for a presentation at St. Joseph’s Church, Amarillo and to participate in the 20th annual Diocesan Celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The West Texas Catholic asked her these Five Questions:

You were in the Diocese of Amarillo during the weekend of our annual celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe and you gave a presentation at St. Joseph’s Church, with one of the topics being Guadalupe: An American Pentecost. Tell us more about this presentation.
Since my earliest memories I have been fascinated by the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Apart from the gospels, no story has had a more significant impact on my life. As a child I saw her image everywhere – the religious symbol of Guadalupe was in every room in my grandmother’s home; the Catholic parish where my family worshipped had a shrine in Guadalupe’s honor; store owners in our neighborhood displayed an image of Guadalupe in their shops. To this day, my mother dedicates a wall in my childhood home to various depictions of Guadalupe, and I have an image of Guadalupe in every room in my home.
With Guadalupe, we have a Marian religious symbol of exceptional importance, so exceptional, I believe, that Guadalupe may be rightly called ‘an American Pentecost’. I am not trying, in any way, to diminish the significance of other Marian apparitions, but Guadalupe is worthy of the title “An American Pentecost” because this symbol mediates for us an experience of the Holy Spirit that echoes the characteristics of the Pentecost event of Acts 2.

On your webpage in the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, it reads that you work at the intersection of Systematic Theology and Practical Theology. Please explain where the bridge is located…
Let me begin by clarifying the difference between Practical Theology and Systematic Theology. While human experience is of vital importance for all forms of theology, Practical Theology assumes the immediacy of human experience as the beginning point for theological reflection. In Practical Theology human experience may be related to a particular context (e.g., immigrants in the U.S.), or to a given Faith Community’s practice of Faith (e.g., how the Diocese of Amarillo celebrates the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe), or to the way we name our experience of God (i.e., our spirituality). Systematic Theology takes into view various fundamentals (revelation, The Bible, tradition, human experience), and themes in theology (God/Trinity, the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, Theological Anthropology, the Church, Creation, Salvation, Eschatology, Mariology) and strives to reflect on these in a manner that speaks to the questions of our own time while remaining faithful to the tradition. At its best, a work of Systematic Theology realizes a high degree of coherency and clarity.
Let me use an example to illustrate the bridge between the two. How might we talk about who God is from the perspective of the economically poor and oppressed? Or, who God is from the lived experience of women? These questions are Practical Theology questions but to develop our response to these questions fully means attempting to address at least some of the various concerns of Systematic Theology. If we consider women’s experience of God, what might this suggest to us about how we read the Bible? Might this suggest that we recognize God as Mother as well as Father?
While my doctorate is in Systematic and Philosophical Theology, today I strive to work at the intersection of Systematic and Practical Theology.

Glancing at your Curriculum Vitae, I noticed that one of your research interests listed was North American Pragmatism and Religious Thought. Why does this topic interest you so?
This is a great follow-up question to the one above. As mentioned above, Systematic Theologians work for coherency in their writings, so, for example, what one writes about Jesus Christ needs to cohere with what one writes about the Church. Since the beginning of the Catholic tradition 2,000 years ago, theologians have used various philosophical schools of thought as a tool to help them achieve coherency. I have found the classical work of North American Pragmatists to be very helpful in my attempts to think in a coherent manner. Why? It is because these philosophers, for me especially C.S. Peirce and Josiah Royce among others, were committed to a foundational relationship between thinking and action in the world. For them the purpose of thought was to direct our action in the world not in a utilitarian way but in a manner that sought out truth. For these thinkers truth in this world was necessarily provisional. This approach to thinking and action serve as a powerful theoretical resource for practical theologies, and for theologies that attempt to encourage greater human interior freedom as we attempt to deepen our relationship with God.

What do you see yourself doing five, ten years from now and what subject matter would you like to tackle that you have yet to investigate?
My passion is to write about salvation, particularly how salvation might be understood not only as a personal matter (much work has already been done on this) but also a social matter. I think the Catholic faithful and the world needs a much more robust social understanding of salvation. By ‘social,’ I mean an understanding of salvation such that each of us sees our salvation as necessarily tied to the salvation of others. Salvation is not merely a concern in the afterlife but is constantly being worked out in the here and now of history. While we will not know the fullness of salvation is this life, nonetheless the partial realization of salvation in human history is integral to God’s plan for us. I intend to write a book on social salvation. This work will build on my first book which explored the evil of the assassination of women (‘feminicide’) arguing that this tragedy demands a fresh consideration of what salvation means (Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez, Fortress Press, 2011). I have also co-edited two collections, one on Hope (published in 2013) and a second on the Holy Spirit (to be published in 2017).
Currently, I am working on a theology book on Our Lady of Guadalupe. There exist numerous devotional books on Guadalupe but very few theological works on her. I will consider what it means to identify her as a religious symbol and to investigate how various theological interpretations of her have functioned, and what kind of interpretations are needed in our own time. For example, how can we interpret Our Lady of Guadalupe so that she encourages the realization of our salvation in the here and now?

The final word in this conversation is yours…
I am a woman of Mexican American ancestry on both sides of my family. I love being a theologian because this ministry brings me closer to God; to gifted young adults who are studying theology as part of their vocation; and to my own Mexican American ancestry. Mexican Americans have such a rich tradition of popular Catholic practices, of extraordinary liturgical music, and of religious art. I look forward to making a contribution to theological work in these areas.